Introduction

The incentive of writing about health software comes from the recent
experience of developing a project of critical software based on health back-
office data. The main intent of this paper is to examine vectors of influence of
biopower within the deployment of health data in the machine of health
software. The study case chosen for this endeavour is the software culture and
the databasing of human health specific to British Primary Care Trusts (PCTs)
where the model of biopolitics brings together the government, multinational
corporations and the population.

Although historically speaking the term biopolitics (with its synonym biopower)
was originally coined by the Swede Rudolf Kjellen *[in 1916 in his book The
State as Form of Life] Michel Foucault imbued the concept a true philosophical
weight. He places biopower on the third place of his enumerations of models of
power: sovereign power, disciplinary power and biopower. The object of power
is different to each of these power formations. The first is the life of the
individual who can be let to live or make dead on the discretion of the
sovereign. The second Foucauldian power focuses on the individual body itself
to discipline and optimize its actions for which designated spaces of enclosures
are created. This mutates later into the third model of power, the bio~, which
takes over population to manipulate it in a reverse way to sovereign power:
make live (species life is at stake) or let die. Techniques and regulations are
issued not only to produce ‘a docile peace within civil societies’ *[`Foucault on
War ...`] and manage life but also to engage and experience with it.
*[machineculture – biopolitics, for now] Along these very lines this dissertation
aims, as previously mentioned, to find such ways in which biopolitics is
problematized within the formal qualities and porousness of health care
software.

Gilles Deleuzes’ accounts for Foucauldian theory on biopower leans on the

same concepts of strategy and political sovereignty in terms of which this
model of power functions.
According to the majority of the authors*[look in resources to get the list] on
Foucauldian biopolitics, disciplined societies were created through tactical
measures which segmented and produced cleavages within society. The same
process seems to characterize biopower along with its combinatorial strategies
employed in the coordination and mobilisation of societies as well as in the
‘constitution of norm and populations biopolitically’. *[ `Foucault on War...`]
When Deleuze and Guattari analysed the liberal regime of power*[ Deleuze Gilles
and Guattari Felix (1987) A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. +
G.D. – Foucault + Postscript on the Societies of Control] they tellingly conceived of the
important mutation within the organisation of power from arborescent
formation to rhizomatic forms. Among other designations, these rhizomes
represent the placeholders for the multiplicity of ubiquitous and floating
machinery of control, through which the Deleuzian biopower manifests itself.

A more recent contribution to the area of biopolitics comes out of Eugene

Thacker’s concept of biomedia*[‘Biomedia’ – University of Minnesota Press
2004] conceived from his theoretical construct of ‘genomic body’*[‘ The global
genome: biotechnology, politics, and culture’ – The MIT Press] . What this brings new are
not the interrelations of binary technologies with the atom-based life but rather
the constantly widening degree in which these technologies are “becoming
part and parcel of our understanding of biological <<life itself>>” or in other
words the increasing extent in which the genetic “codes” become computer
“codes”*[global genome] and vice versa.

All the elements included in the above articulation of the theoretical concept of
biopower justify the study of PCT health software as the conceptual machine
which, with its binary logic constitution, infolds normalization and control over
population. This analysis is structured in three chapters, each of them allowing
the attention to be focused on different parts of what health related software
entails. The first section focuses on the back-office health data which,
according to Thacker, undergoes meaningful processes of coding, recoding and
decoding as well as normalizations, dispersions and convergences. The second
chapter examines the technologies, techniques and conduits related to
biopolitics within the modus operandi of PCTs back-end software, and finally the
third section accounts for tactical and artistic expressions of genomics and
biopower. The aim is to identify bases on which the biopolitics inscribed in
binary data processes renders the machine of health software more
transforming and transformative.